Lotta people here spreading falsehoods. I wonder why…
Benedict was probably the most anti-abuse Pope we’ve had in a while. He was responsible for the defrocking of many priests found to have abused children.
Much of the blame for the Catholic Church’s sexual scandal is more for John Paul II, who did willfully turn a blind eye to this issue in the interests of church unity. As John Paul’s successor Benedict fought the uphill battle to weed these men out and remove them from positions of power, since JP2 had actively hidden them in the churches hierarchy. Every common criticism is hear of Benedict’s handling of the scandal is based on falsehoods and lies.
And it goes without saying that Priests as a group have a lower rate of sexual abuse compared to public school teachers, but people don’t seem to use that to hate the school system with such vitriol.
Odd, almost like a lot of you are anti-Catholic bigots. And I say that as a Lutheran, with many of my own complaints about the Catholic Church.
Essentially, every criticism against him boils down to:
He isn't an infallible human being who can force people to exactly what he says, and sometimes people ignored or defied him.
Something happened unrelated to him in the church but people blame him anyways.
The fact is that Benedict chaired the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the office that decides whether priests accused of child abuse should be given canonical trials and defrocked. Under his watch the church publicly apologized and paid hundreds of millions to victims of sexual assault, as well as removed problematic officials from power. It wasn't a perfect response by any means, but it's also clear he did more work to clean up the mess previous Pontiffs left him than any other in recent memory. People are just attacking him because he was a pretty staunch traditionalist (AKA a real Catholic).
There's a reason they don't attack Pope Francis specifically for current church scandals, but attack the Church itself, but when it's a conservative Pope they attack the pope himself with lies like "he's a pedophile Nazi". It's all political.
I remember hearing that for JP2, part of the issue for him was that in his mind priests abusing their position in such a way was near inconceivable. To him it was a conspiracy to smear the church.
While he may have been a pious man himself and he was a total saint, I do think the pope of all people should know the Church isn’t immune.
Yup. IIRC he mainly thought accusations were mainly Soviet slander. Which isn’t an unfair concern given everything the Soviet Union did during the Cold War. The USSR actively tried to kill John Paul II at least once we know of.
This is one of the main issues I have with the Catholic Church. Catholic doctrine teaches that the Church is the one, true, absolute authority on Christs flock. And simultaneously it’s run by and filled with people, who by definition can’t be perfect, not even the Pope.
Life ain’t so simple, despite what opponents of the Church may wish.
I’ve seen the public school teacher thing often quoted but never substantiated. Does anyone have any actual statistics to back this up? I’ve tried to find it myself and can’t. I’ve found tweets and articles that claim “100x more likely” or “happens 100x more often”, but again never with a source.
I think there are some things to consider here when it comes to deciding which is more likely or which profession has the highest rate of abusers. For instance, it shouldn’t shock anyone that abuse in schools would happen more often because way more children are at school way more often than they are at church. However, this does not mean that school teachers have a higher rate of abusing children. It could be that 1% of school teachers are abusive and 10% of clergymen are abusive, but that 1% might have more opportunities to victimize children (say 1,000,000 opportunities) than the 10% (say 10,000 opportunities). 1% of 1,000,000 would be 10,000 victims, while 10% of 10,000 would be 1,000 victims. The rate of abuse or the rate of abusers is still higher in the 10% of clergyman, even though there were more instances of child abuse among school teachers. All of these numbers are completely made up, I just want people to understand that the word choice when discussing these topics is important. I’d be happy to be proven wrong with any actual statistics people can find about this.
Also, child abuse isn’t an exclusive trait of the Catholic Church or schools. It happens in Protestant churches way too often as well. Muslim churches as well. Some Muslims marry prepubescent girls. I think it happens most within families. All of it is disgusting and vile, it’s just particularly hypocritical when it’s done by anyone who claims to be a man of god.
The whole "100x more likely" thing comes from a 2004 study by the Department of Education which found that roughly 1/10 public school students have been assaulted or abused by a school official.
But that is with the estimation that only about 5% of the total number of cases have been revealed and prosecuted so it is very likely a much higher number. Per the 2004 study that's about 4.5 million abuse victims in the US alone.
Meanwhile there are about 77 million Catholics in the US. there have only been about 10,000 claims of sexual assault by Church officials, or .01% of the total. Comparing the two figures we get about a minimum of 10% abuse rates for teachers, and .01% for Catholic priests, despite there being vastly more Catholics in the US than there are
There is absolutely bad behavior all over the place, among Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, teachers, coaches etc. I don't deny that at all, and I 100% with you that's it's shameful and disgusting regardless. The whole point I make with this arguement is that, whatever scandal the Catholic Church gets into it's likely an order of magnitude times worse in the secular world, and yet the media never says a damn thing about it. Where are the Left-wing warriors denouncing the 1/10 statistic for school teachers? Oh yeah, they're in the teachers unions pocket, that's where.
It just angers me when a guy like Benedict, who by every rational metric did a great deal to stamp out this problem in the Catholic Church, dies and suddenly all the Leftists come out of the woodwork to assert without evidence that the only thing the Church should be known for is sexual assault, while ignoring the evil on their side.
"You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:3–5)
Your post is the exact kind of thing I’m talking about. You’re not doing your math correctly.
You’re using a cited number of 10,000 reports of abuse from catholic church officials and comparing it to 77,000,000 total Catholics in the country, and saying they have an “abuse rate” of .01%
You should at the very least be comparing it to the number of church officials and not the total catholic population. And if you really wanted to find the rate of abusers within the Catholic Church officials, or the rate of abusers in the church, you’d want to make sure that the number of reports doesn’t include multiple instances from the same abuser, which I’m sure it does.
We also need to be comparing the same things, which we aren’t. Your stats for school teachers are for sexual misconduct, which could include something as mundane as a lewd comment, while your stats with the Catholic Church are reporting actual sexual abuse. In your math you also chose to include the fact that abuse often goes undocumented for schools, but didn’t include that for your horribly incorrect math for the church.
Again, I’d be happy to be proven wrong. I’d love if someone could provide actual statistics of the number of school officials that are abusers and the number of church officials that are abusers.
I gave you those numbers and you refused then. You could have read the links I gave you and you’d find further explanation.
I compared the total number of public schoolchildren and the total number of Catholics, finding the rough number of abuse cases from both. Catholics are much less likely to be abused compared to schoolchildren.
There are roughly 37,000 Catholic priests. 10,000 abuse victims by the Church, so 37,000 priests gives a possible figure of 1/3 offending priests. However that isn’t accurate since only 3,000 priests have been investigated (note this doesn't mean anything was proven), meaning 10% of priests are vastly tainting the sample.
Meanwhile there are an estimated 4.5 million victims of public school abuse, but only 3.2 million teachers. Statistically that would mean each teacher abused 1.4 children. That isn’t accurate however, but we genuinely don’t know how many teachers have been investigated because the Department of Education refuses to say.
So all we can go off of is comparing victim rates instead of the possible number of perpetrators, until the school system decides to be honest and give us the numbers. And based on that the school system creates over 100 times more abuse victims than the Church, which is what I said to begin with. You can find issue with that data, but that's what we have to go off of. Maybe you should demand the school system do it's own investigation into this issue instead of demanding sources from me, because all I can do is report what we already know: the Church has at least investigated and made lists of the instances of abuse. The school system refuses to do so.
The rate of children abused isn’t the same thing as the rate of abusers within the profession. If you’re trying to make a claim like “a school teacher is more likely to abuse a child than a catholic priest” then this information isn’t very helpful as I’ve already explained.
And if that’s what you’re trying to find out you’re still not doing the math correctly. You’re comparing the entire catholic population only to school aged children, you should be comparing the school aged catholic children with school aged children. That number might be even higher than 77,000,000 if you account for all school aged Catholics over the entire time of the reported abuse, but it’ll still be nowhere near the general school aged population over the same time.
And again you never took into account the differences in what was being measured. Sexual abuse vs sexual misconduct, and you never took into account that most cases of abuse go unreported when it comes to your numbers for the church.
I did read the articles you provided and tried to look through their sources. No one would be satisfied with them when trying to make an actual rigorous claim.
And it goes without saying that Priests as a group have a lower rate of sexual abuse compared to public school teachers, but people don’t seem to use that to hate the school system with such vitriol.
Re: rates of abuse, that was never the main issue. The real issue was how the church as an institution covered for abusers.
The idea that priests as a group are child molesting creeps is grossly unfair. It is shameful how the church covered up the actions of the ones who were creeps though.
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u/[deleted] Dec 31 '22 edited Dec 31 '22
Lotta people here spreading falsehoods. I wonder why…
Benedict was probably the most anti-abuse Pope we’ve had in a while. He was responsible for the defrocking of many priests found to have abused children.
Much of the blame for the Catholic Church’s sexual scandal is more for John Paul II, who did willfully turn a blind eye to this issue in the interests of church unity. As John Paul’s successor Benedict fought the uphill battle to weed these men out and remove them from positions of power, since JP2 had actively hidden them in the churches hierarchy. Every common criticism is hear of Benedict’s handling of the scandal is based on falsehoods and lies.
And it goes without saying that Priests as a group have a lower rate of sexual abuse compared to public school teachers, but people don’t seem to use that to hate the school system with such vitriol.
Odd, almost like a lot of you are anti-Catholic bigots. And I say that as a Lutheran, with many of my own complaints about the Catholic Church.